Electricity Costs

The main operational costs for miners are the hardware and the electricity cost, both for running the miners but also for providing adequate cooling and ventilation. Some major mining operations have been purposely located near cheap electricity. The largest mining operation in North America, run by MegaBigPower, is located on by the Columbia River in Washington State, where hydroelectric power is plentiful and electricity prices are the lowest in the nation.

CloudHashing runs a large mining operation in Iceland, where electricity generated from hydroelectric and geothermal power sources is also renewable and cheap, and where the cold northern climate helps provide cooling.

Mining Hardware

Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining. In the earliest days of Bitcoin, mining was done with CPUs from normal desktop…